


When I'm 64

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Category: Prince Lestat - Fandom, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: AIDS, Clubbing, Immortality's a Bitch, M/M, Sad, Stockholm Syndrome, generational differences, the 1980s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 20:24:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8767969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: If I'd been out till quarter to threeWould you lock the door?Will you still need me, will you still feed meWhen I'm sixty-four?   You'll be older tooAnd if you say the wordI could stay with you Daniel Molloy is twice as old now as he was when he died, and the world around him has marched on even if he seems still to be that abandoned boy seeking oblivion in the nightlife of clubs. He feels it, sometimes, even when the man he's with is so very much older.He feels it more than ever when people like him are dying in the streets all over the planet, and the people in charge won't bother to stop it.Nobody wants a club kid to age, though. Not really. And nobody wants him to think.





	

It was dark. Outside on the streets his people were dying, and inside an even darker club Daniel Molloy was trying to lose himself. Story of his life, even though he was 64 rather than 32 and had thought being young and dumb would never get him again. 

He could feel the people around him breathing like a great, single mass of living flesh, himself now that poetic canker at the heart of the rose. His eyes (his vampire eyes, he still delighted in calling them, though Marius would shake his head and scold him for being irreverent) could make out the fears and lusts in dozens of blown-wide pupils. Those he followed, stalked them and kissed sweet drops from their addled veins until the night became a dark kaleidoscope. He loved it. He loved them. 

So what, people were dying. So what? They all died, even people who thought they were immortal. He'd seen it himself--boys barely old enough to lie their way in with glowsticks in hand and runny noses who dropped dead in six weeks, bodies shrunken and dried and rotten. Shoveled into unmarked graves. 

It'd been every man for himself then. You put yourself out among the masses and put a target on your back, and you prayed lapsed-Catholic prayers that someone would take you away from it. Those were the lucky ones, the kept ones. Above the law and above reproach. 

He had someone to take care of him now.

(He'd been taken care of then, too, dressed and housed and showered in money and booze. His diseased blood had tasted good to that winsome monster with the bright eyes and black heart; his body had been beautiful to it even while he withered and rotted.)

He knew, now, how that was possible. He could see the loveliness in a too-flushed face, in sweat and need and a life even shorter, even more precious.

He hated being able to see beauty in that. He hated knowing how his flagging health had excited the one who'd loved him.

Not like Marius.

Marius kept him safe, cradled him close except when he was busy--somehow there was danger in the night, but it was alright for Daniel to hunt. It didn't make sense, sometimes; but then, Daniel hadn't been right for a long time.

Marius loved him safe, not on a razor's edge. Marius loved him at home, didn't get possessive of Daniel in the clubs with the boys whose hot hands delighted in his body, cold now as though he  _ had _ died those many years ago.

Daniel didn't think much about the in-between years. When he was alive he would pass out in a fever, sweating and sick and covered in his own filth, raw-red with lesions. He'd stopped being himself and transformed into some kind of heaving, disgusting pig, becoming everything he hated about his aging, failing body. 

Armand had told him over and over again how he loved him, eternally patient as he cleaned him and kissed him and stole his poison blood. Patient as he watched Daniel run, until running was no longer an option.

Daniel caught one of the club’s dancers in his arms because he could, because he was strong and they couldn't stop him. He held them only a moment, high on his own heartbeat, and whirled to the next. They were so alive, and they didn't know anymore. T-cell counts were for the "developing world" now, and for relics of the past like him. 

Marius was the past. The epitome of it, with his great knowledge of books and philosophy that he threw away to paint flowers. He never answered Daniel's questions now that he was back, now that he was sane. He would shake his head and tease that he'd liked Daniel better when he was quiet (when he couldn't find words more than two at a time in the cloud of his thoughts), when Daniel had clung close to the only thing that seemed solid in a world rapidly melting, melting without the constrictions of time and death. 

They told him afterward he'd been mad, that Armand had delivered him into safe care (had gotten rid of him, more like). He himself only remembered gentle hands and cold ones, and great gouts of blood. 

There was something he could worship, blood. It owned him life and death, after all.

Armand had professed to love his defiance and fleeing for so long, Daniel'd convinced himself it meant forever. He'd thought that it was good to have some personality, spunk for his partner to bounce against; he hadn't understood he was running out his lover's patience.

(Faster even than Louis had. Only ten years. He wondered, sometimes, what Louis was doing now.)

Marius asked little of him, and would never leave him. Warned him, sometimes, that the nights were full of dangers, but that was nothing new to Daniel. Nights had been when he feared death from the moment Louis touched him, the instant Armand captured him body and soul.

Armand had promised over and over to kill him; the worse fear had been that death would come in the daylight, lungs full of fluid smothering him before darkness could fall. Before Armand could suck the poison out.

Marius wouldn't ask him to run to the ends of the earth, or beg for eternity. He granted his blood, his power, generously, pressing Daniel down onto black sheets or into darkened corners or occasionally holding him perched on his lap, millennial strength rendering Daniel's weight negligible. All he asked was what Daniel always should have given Armand: that he come when called, dance and smile, and be a good obedient boy.

Be loving. Properly.

(The disobedient didn't live. Never mind how disobedience was sometimes the only way--never mind the triangles and the silence, the quilts and marches and screaming. The bodies ignored until the shouting began. That was not the way of vampires; for them, the renegade young burned without change.)

His battered iPhone buzzed in his pocket, and he didn't have to pluck it out to know he was expected. He thought for a moment about ignoring it and staying. It was barely midnight, the thrumming bass around him just barely beginning to get its claws in. He wanted to stay. 

He didn't. 

He'd railed once against Marius -- his rules, his overbearing presence, his guiding hand. They’d been in Venice, Marius’ Venice, and he’d made a real scene. Marius had smiled and turned to walk away, vanishing before Daniel could track what was happening. He'd taken it as a joke at first, barely on his feet and not much beyond those first sweet tastes of stabilizing blood. 

He'd walked around the city for hours, feeling his empty pockets and watching the crowds around him with near nausea. There were so many of them, all smelling of sweat and germs and perfumes and a dozen other things all beating at his skull at once. The tall buildings along the narrow streets were pressing in on him, threatening to crush him. 

Something sweet and rotting had crept into his nose, something he'd known in the last terrifying months he was a mortal--your tongue molding and putrefying in your mouth, turning white and turgid (he was so thankful his neck had never swollen with huge hard lumps, obscuring the one thing that had kept him valuable). He started to wonder if the smell was coming from him, if he was somehow alive and decaying all over again. 

He started to run. He ran until his legs began to wobble and weaken, which shouldn't have been possible because he was dead, but they failed him all the same. He fell to his knees and clawed at the ground, feeling that need to be buried and safe and dead, truly dead, rather than back there again--

And then Marius was there, and Marius was holding and soothing him, and telling him that he was perfect and beautiful.

Lies. Lies. Marius had painted his lovers in the past, but he didn't paint Daniel. Just flowers in abandoned houses, flourishing unnoticed within decrepit exteriors. Those murals were not  _ of _ the houses, but so much more valuable.

More enthralling than Daniel.

Rio was not yet empty, the heat of summer and the continual glut of tourists keeping the streets rushing with people in a macrocosm, a blowup of their very veins. He hungered for them still, would always, but made his way against the stream back to their empty home.

(Of course empty. Marius knew when there was danger and called him back, but it needn't disturb one that old and strong.)

Too empty. Too lonely. No other vampire voices, vampire eyes, except thousands of miles away in New York.

Benji was Armand's and Marius's, and he spoke to Daniel when no one else did.

He could very nearly love him for that, if not for all the reasons he had to hate instead.

He huddled on the couch with his eyes closed and his arms around his knees, listening. Already Benji sounded stronger than him. Assured, even when he was pleading for help. Daniel's had shaken so badly at the publisher's meetings that they'd thought he was on the verge of seizing. They’d called him “sensitive.” He’d thought Armand had liked that.

_ Is she prettier than me? _ he mocked himself.  _ Is she younger? _

He was used to being left. He'd been used to being on his own once too, but now the thought made his chest constrict until he couldn't breathe, never mind that he didn't need to. It had taken him so long to conceive the world outside his miniature models. 

_ Ahhh _ . Marius would say when he came home to find Daniel's city a wreck (it had flashed at him and looked suddenly alive, suddenly threatening, and he'd crushed it to prove he could).  _ What a troublesome thing I've bought myself. _

In the beginning, when Daniel was obstinate, there would be no blood. He'd be lectured, sitting across from one another at a simple table, and if he rolled his eyes or sneered Marius would wait patiently, hourly, before going on. Daniel would feel the old blood recirculating in his vein by the hour, poisonous and bubbling as it pulled his veins tighter tighter  _ tighter _ until he was sure it would start eating him up again. Then he'd say whatever he needed to. Just so he could go out to the streets, or straight into Marius' arms, and fill himself with fresh, clean blood. 

He was a reporter. A journalist. He  _ knew _ it didn't work like that. But he was dead now, and he'd never interviewed the other club kids and cubs in their shallow graves.

It felt like hours that he sat there, listening to the words and the music and feeling almost present, as though they were truly speaking for  _ him _ . Stupid; he'd been an obstacle and a burden, nothing more.

He didn't have a watch, and there were no clocks in their place. Marius had been born long before their invention, and the sight of time passing, ticking away, made Daniel... anxious.

How long had he been out before being called home? It couldn't have been that late. Outside, the moon still hung high in the blue velvet sky.

_ Why Rio? _ he wondered sometimes. He couldn't blend well here--his skin was too pale, no touch of tourist tan to it. He had to wear slacks and jackets, no more cutoffs and crop tops like back when his body matched his age. (It had stopped matching his age before he died. He'd felt a thousand years old, some nights, and also certain that he'd never reach that age.) He still assured Marius that he loved it here.

Burnings. Benji spoke of things Daniel had seen, with the naive panic and optimism of any teenage activist with access to a bullhorn.

Still.

Comforting.

He could’ve done that, he told himself in his more bitter hours. He could have been their voice, traveling and taking down all their stories, their woes and legends. But he hadn't. He'd fallen into a thick, deep lake of blood and they'd left him behind. David recorded the histories. Benji was their intrepid reporter. 

Daniel was just a good-time boy who'd stuck around past his sell-by date. 

Burnings in Czechoslovakia. In Malaysia. Raids in San Francisco, evictions in New York. Things never really changed. Maybe Marius was right about that. 

"Daniel." 

Marius stood in the doorway wearing a look of naked distress, and that truly left Daniel's heart pounding. To think he was worth that, after all the trouble he'd caused. After wrecking the house and taking all of Marius' time, day and night devoted to just the two of them while the rest of the world slipped away. Drinking down blood and blood and blood. 

He was in Marius' arms, and he was hungry. The thread of Benji's voice in the background kept him anchored, made him feel like part of the world again. Even now he felt like he was on the edge of a cliff, waiting to fall back into shapeless uncertainty.

"Marius." He said the name, confirmed the identity attached to the lightly-muscled body that held him. Platinum hair smelt of leaf mold, asbestos, damp, all overlaid with the clean chemical scent of acrylic paint. The fingers he kissed were flecked with it, smeared and stippled. Like his own, when he made his cities, but this was  _ art _ .

And beneath it, blood.

He should make New York, some day. Build a home, hide speakers within the facades--let that voice come to him from something like its origin. Imagine walking up to it, knocking, being invited in--though everyone knew it wasn't permitted. Everyone knew young ones were banned from Manhattan.

(Daniel had always been more Greenwich, anyway.)

"Listen, my friends. Listen. We are one tri--"

Marius didn't have to move to turn it off; he was no young one.

"Daniel, you're trembling."

Was he?

He was, once it was said aloud, at any rate. 

"I,"  _ was listening to that. Feel like I want to run somewhere and hide from you. Feel like I would collapse without you holding me up, and I wasn't always like that. Is that love? Can you tell me? _ "I missed you is all." 

"I would have you by my side always, if I could." Marius didn't approve of him going clubbing. Marius scoffed at the offer to go with him, saying it was beneath their dignity as vampires. Marius...

Marius was pressing Daniel's head to his neck, inviting him close. "I already know." 

(Marius always knew what he was thinking. That's why they were so happy now).

Rude, modern Daniel bit down without further invitation, standing on his toes and winding his arms around that cold marble neck. 

This was how it had started somewhere for someone. The terror of being left alone if you turned down the comfort of a familiar stranger. The desire to forget how much the world outside wanted to see you dead and just feel good for one goddamned minute, Trusting his word that it was safe. Feeling sluggish and heavy and  _ hot _ like he did now, and hang the consequences. 

It hadn't happened like that for him. He couldn't even remember when it had, after so many rooms and countries and bodies of varying configurations. What had a 15th century vampire known about modern disease? Armand made sure Daniel's nose wasn't rotting off and called it a night, and somewhere he started boiling alive under his skin. That had felt dead like he did now, staring at a place on the wall a little over a broad shoulder and trying to chase someone who wasn't there.

He'd always lived thanks to the strength of others, and died by it, too. Armand had damned him and saved him from the massacre then.

Now, he had Marius. He had to trust that that would be enough of a shield, as his people went up in pillars of heat around the world and the establishment nodded sagely that it was for the best.

Marius was right, he thought as blood-and-paint stained hands traced his perfect, unmarked white canvas form.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

God, he still needed a drink.

**Author's Note:**

> Written on World AIDS Day 2016.  
> People keep saying "We survived Reagan."


End file.
